Nurses at a clinic in Kenya put this child on a feeding program and began monitoring his weight. They prepared the Nutty Butta at the clinic and fed the child on Jan. 10, 2010. He was the first recipient at the clinic.

International aid workers believe they are finally making some progress in the heartbreaking battle against the drought and famine that have claimed tens of thousands of lives in the Horn of Africa.

At overcrowded refugee camps, they report, young lives are being saved. And much of the progress can be attributed to small foil packets filled with nutrient-packed peanut butter made by a New Jersey company that traces its history to a small deli founded in Newark in 1895.

"How would you feel if you could say you had helped save the lives of one million children," said Ben Tabatchnick, owner of Tabatchnick Fine Foods in Somerset.

Nonprofit organizations have been using the product, Nutty Butta, for two years. Just this summer, the U.S. Agency for International Development bought its first 1,000 metric tons of therapeutic peanut pastes, half of which will come from the Tabatchnick company.

More than 13 million people across the Horn of Africa need humanitarian aid to survive, including 4 million — almost half the population — in Somalia, the U.N. said earlier this month. Crisis-level food shortages have been occurring in civil war-wracked Somalia since the 1990s, and the current famine could claim 750,000 more lives by the end of the year.

Stark statistics like that motivated the Tabatchnick family to create a therapeutic food program a few years ago. The company, whose main product line is frozen soups sold in national grocery chains in most states, also makes fortified milks used in Haiti.

No small feat for a 35-employee business.

"He could just make soup," said Liliana Bachelder, an international trade specialist at the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service. "But it takes some extra effort for small producers to get involved. The paperwork and approvals can be overwhelming."

She met Tabatchnick in Washington a few years ago at a meeting about food assistance programs.

"Both of us have spoken about when we leave this Earth, will we have done anything to make it better. Ben is in all sense of the word a real 'mensch,'" she said, using the Yiddish term for a person of integrity.

Nutty Butta was born in 2009 after Tabatchnick heard from UNICEF that there was a pressing need for therapeutic foods.

At the time, a French company called NutriSet had cornered the market with a patent on their recipe for Plumpy’nut. Tabatchnick’s Nutty Butta broke their monopoly with lower pricing and made way for competition from other U.S. producers, including Rhode Island-based Industrial Revelations and North Carolina-based Mana Nutritive Aid Products.

Tabatchnick keeps his Somerset plant free of nuts to eliminate the risk of contaminating allergen-free food, like sauces, milks and sorbet he makes for school cafeterias. When he decided to start making Nutty Butta, he reached out to the American Peanut Council for advice and eventually settled on a production facility in Stone Mountain, Ga.

Nutty Butta was first used in Africa by a Christian nonprofit, David’s Hope International took 500 pounds of the peanut paste to Eburru, a rural village in Kenya where many children eat little more than rice and beans.

Monty Philpot, who traveled with the charity and oversees government relations at Georgia Health Sciences University, said the effects of the children’s diet were striking.

"I worked with some kids who looked like they were 12," she said, "but they were really 18 and 19."

Before therapeutic pastes, malnourished children were treated with special milk formulas in field hospitals. But space in those clinics was limited.

Now aid workers can bring help to patients and the resulting success stories, said Werner Schultink, who heads UNICEF’s nutrition programs in New York, can be astounding.

"These kids go right back up in weight. Their skin becomes glossy and good again," he said. "They laugh again. They play again. They become kids like they should be."

The foil packets caught on quickly. UNICEF distributes them at 8,000 centers in Ethiopia, an eightfold increase from 2008, and is sending them to aid workers in other parts of the Horn of Africa.

UNICEF estimates that 20 million children worldwide suffer from severe malnutrition and would benefit from therapeutic foods.

In terms of volume and profit, foods intended for humanitarian aid account for a very small percentage of what Tabatchnick’s company produces. He said slim profit margins act as a buffer against raw material price increases.

The American Peanut Council, which helped the New Jersey soup merchant start making Nutty Butta, wants to see more companies follow his lead.

"I think for him it’s kind of a humanitarian project. He’s invested way more money than he’s making at the moment," said Stephanie Grunenfelder, the council’s vice president of international marketing. "It’s a little bit of a business-slash-social responsibility kind of project. But this is not a high profit business. Not for anybody."